I. Field
The following description relates generally to wireless communication systems and more particularly to scheduling and managing group resources in a wireless communication network.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, data, and other content. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., bandwidth and transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, 3rd Generation Partnership Project Long Term Evolution (3GPP LTE) systems, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, and so forth.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communication system can simultaneously support communication for multiple wireless terminals. Each terminal communicates with one or more base stations through transmissions on the forward and reverse links. The forward link (or downlink) refers to the communication link from base stations to the terminals, and the reverse link (or uplink) refers to the communication link from the terminals to the base stations. This communication link may be established through a single-in-single-out, multiple-in-single-out or a multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) system.
A MIMO system employs multiple (NT) transmit antennas and multiple (NR) receive antennas for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the NT transmit and NR receive antennas may be decomposed into NS independent channels, which are also referred to as spatial channels, where NS≦min{NT, NR}. Each of the NS independent channels corresponds to a dimension. The MIMO system can provide improved performance (e.g., higher throughput and/or greater reliability) if the additional dimensionalities created by the multiple transmit and receive antennas are utilized.
A MIMO system supports a time division duplex (TDD) and frequency division duplex (FDD) systems. In a TDD system, the forward and reverse link transmissions are on the same frequency region so that the reciprocity principle allows the estimation of the forward link channel from the reverse link channel. This enables the access point to extract transmit beamforming gain on the forward link when multiple antennas are available at the access point.
Generally, there are a large number of users that can access a system at any time. Each of these users needs to be scheduled and provided resources. With a large number of users, if every packet needs to be scheduled, a large amount of resources need to be dedicated to this scheduling. In addition, each packet contains information relating to the scheduling, which requires system resources and contributes to the amount of information that needs to be transmitted.